About the importance of hypotheses

“You only see what you know.” – That’s a very common saying and especially prominent in travel books: Whenever you set for a new adventure into a new country, your eyes will meet so many new things. Most of those things won’t catch your eye and stay unnoticed because you simply didn’t realize them.
However, have you ever thought what this saying implies to science? Doesn’t it question the basic idea of empirical studies? What are all those observations about if they will only reveal what we’ve already known? This is a very important and probably the most perspicuous approach to learn about the importance as well as the limits of a research-leading theory and hypotheses. Indeed, the saying suggests that even empirical studies can never deliver more evidence but what the theory which the observation is based on allowed. This rather disillusioning conclusion is the basic message of the theory of second order cybernetics. Further, it applies for every area of theoretical conception, even outside the field of sciences. However, science has come up with a rather imaginative, literally imaginative way to somewhat circumvent that basic restriction: assumption. You simply assume that there is something and then keep looking out for it. If you find it, your assumption gets confirmed, in natural sciences even proven. If there’s no sign of evidence, your assumption’s wrong, respectively unproven. That’s the basic idea of hypotheses and a very powerful concept, indeed. But again, even in this case, critics of second order cybernetics could demur that assumption’s based on imagination which again can only construct ideas out of experience. Just as dreams are distorted, mixed-up or reconstructed impressions and thoughts, imagination is always restricted to the set of experience we’ve made.